I’ve seen several posts on the internet asking about the North Pole on Google Maps: where is it? Why isn’t there any snow there? Where’s Santa’s house?
There’s a couple of reasons why the ice around the North Pole is not shown on Google Maps.
#1: The Arctic is weird
Both Google Earth and Google Maps show “open ocean” north of Greenland, even though it’s normally pretty icy up there. A commonly cited reason is that the Arctic ice cap is floating on open ocean; there’s no land underneath that reaches sea level. Antarctica, on the other hand, does conceal land above sea level. Thus, the reasoning goes, the Arctic does not qualify as land, and is rendered as ocean based on depth data.
This explanation falls a little bit short, though, because to be consistent, Antarctica should be rendered very differently — if you stripped the ice away from Antarctica, you’d find a collection of multiple islands and archipelagos:
The real reason that the Arctic and Antarctica are represented differently then, it seems, is a combination of several factors:
- Antarctica has many more interesting features, and the imagery used for Antartica was provided specially by a partnership of USGS, BAS, NASA, and the NSF.
- The Arctic is rapidly changing, sometimes the sea ice is broken even right at the North Pole.
- Few people care whether they see the ice cap; Google probably provides based on a trade-off of ease-of-provision and customer interest.
#2: Google Maps misses everything within 500km of the poles
This is a completely separate issue. It’s easy to assume that the top of the map stops at 90°N. But it doesn’t — it’s 85°N (85.0511° N, to be more precise.) The lines of latitude get more and more spaced out as you head away from the equator, and they never, ever quite reach 90°N, even if you go way off the map:
Try zooming in, and notice how the lines get very spaced out near the top and bottom of the map. Also notice how 86°N appears off the top of the map, along with 87, 88 and 89. You’ll never find 90°N, it’s an infinite distance away!
So why did Google choose to space the latitude lines so unevenly? In short, when you take the three-dimensional, spherical surface of the earth and try to distort it onto a two-dimensional computer screen, you inevitably end up having to make compromises. It’s just like trying to peel the skin of an orange and press it flat on the table — it’s impossible to do without ripping.
Cartographers use many different techniques, called map projections, to project the three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional screen or page. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Mercator projection, which is the one used by Google maps, has the following advantages:
- No matter where you are on the map, true north is always directly up the page.
- The Mercator projection is conformal — this means that when you zoom into the map, the view doesn’t become distorted. This property is the reason why the lines of latitude are spaced out the way that they are; for example, any zoomed-in view of places close to the poles would be terribly distorted if evenly-spaced lines of latitude were used.
There are also some disadvantages to the Mercator projection:
- It is not an equal-area projection, which means countries that are the same area in real life will not necessarily appear to have the same area on the map. For example, the size of Greenland is quite exaggerated.
- Some latitudes near the north and south pole are missing. If you choose to crop your world map to a perfect square, you end up missing the world north of 85°N and south of 85°S.
Any map projection will always have some disadvantages like those listed above; for example it is impossible to create a projection that is both conformal and completely represents the entire planet in a finite page or computer screen. Google had to make a compromise, and they chose to ignore the top and bottom 5° of the planet.
Bonus mathematics: Where does 85.0511° come from?
The Mercator projection transforms a latitude and longitude into coordinates on the page like so:
The longitude () ranges between -180° and 180°, which is in radians. This means also ranges between . If we want the map to form a perfect square, then will also go between and . So, the latitude at the top of the map can be found by subsituting :